


Here, bullet, here

by a_good_soldier



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bisexual Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester Deserves Nice Things, Episode: s01e18 Something Wicked, Gen, Gun Violence, Homophobic Language, Internalized Homophobia, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, M/M, Repressed Dean Winchester, Violence, homophobic violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-14
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-21 22:36:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30028902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_good_soldier/pseuds/a_good_soldier
Summary: When Dean is fourteen, Dad marches into a motel room and shoots a shtriga feeding on Sam. Dean pokes his head around the doorway after the fact and Dad looks at him and hates him. And Sam is alive. Dad’s shotgun aims casually at Dean from where it was set on the floor by Dad’s uncautious, desperate, terrified hands. And Sam is alive. And Dean thinks— thank God for that bullet.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 28
Kudos: 221





	Here, bullet, here

**Author's Note:**

> I picked up Natalie Diaz's _Postcolonial Love Poem_ today and read ["Catching Copper"](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nataliediaz/poem-catching-copper-by-natalie-diaz) and then wrote this entire thing in one sitting from start to finish.
> 
> It's a beautiful poem, so definitely recommend giving it a read. Re: this fic - I hope you find it as interesting as I found it to write. Feel free to msg me on my supernatural sideblog [@s11e17](https://s11e17.tumblr.com/) on tumblr if you have questions/need more warnings/etc.

When Dean is fourteen, Dad marches into a motel room and shoots a shtriga feeding on Sam. Dean pokes his head around the doorway after the fact and Dad looks at him and hates him. And Sam is alive. Dad’s shotgun aims casually at Dean from where it was set on the floor by Dad’s uncautious, desperate, terrified hands. And Sam is alive. And Dean thinks— _thank God for that bullet_.

* * *

Out back of Donnie’s there’s a dumpster and an ice machine and a small, private space between them, a corner perfect for a smoke set into the back of the bar. Dean doesn’t go there. Dean helps Donnie clean up, but he won’t take the trash out. When they’re short on hands and Donnie needs someone to go out back so’s he can fill up the ice trough, Dean lets him go out and does him a favor by staying at the bar to get folks their drinks.

Donnie gives him free drinks sometimes. Says it’s payment for the favors, says he figures he owes Dean more than he knows. Dean doesn’t tell him he’s right, of course, just waves it all off, but he takes the drinks. They’re safe enough, because they’re payment. There’s no desire behind those drinks. Dean doesn’t go there.

* * *

One day — in the shooting range, because they have a shooting range in the bunker, because this bunker was built to satisfy the Dean who knows how to settle for what he has — Cas comes down into the doorway. He watches Dean shoot a perfect circle around the bullseye.

“Impressive,” Cas says, once Dean takes the earmuffs off. “I’ve been wondering if I should learn to shoot.”

“Nah,” Dean replies, instinctively, and then realizes he has to explain himself now. He looks at the gun in his hands. This gun has saved lives. Cas is older than dirt, older than time, hardly an innocent, but Dean still thinks— maybe it’s for him to carry his bullets around in their lethal cage. Maybe Cas doesn’t have to live like that. Dean never took Ben shooting, no matter how bad Ben asked. He hates seeing Claire with a gun in her hands. He hates the way Sam strips a shotgun.

Cas walks into the range. He picks up one of the handguns Dean left out on the back table, weighing it in his hand. “I understand that shooting is an important skill.”

“You got your angel blade,” Dean says, mouth dry. He swallows, and his throat clicks. “Don’t gotta worry about crap like— like this.” Human crap, he thinks. Winchester crap. Once, it hit him that in that other world, the one Zachariah tossed him and Sam into, they were still named after guns. Smith and Wesson.

Cas’s brow twitches down. “It bothers you,” he says. And then he tries, “I assure you, I’m well aware of gun safety protocol.”

“Yeah, I know, Cas.” As if the problem is — there’s more to it, is all. He knows he can trust Cas around guns, Jesus Christ, what a hypocritical douchebag he’d be if he didn’t.

Cas puts the handgun down. It’s one of Dad’s old Rugers, a P90 maybe, hefty and solid in Cas’s hand. Dean tries not to think about what Cas would look like, firing quick and brutal at Dean’s target without that trench coat covering his shoulders, but he thinks about it anyway. Cas would be beautiful and terrifying with a gun in his hand. Monsters would flock to him, for the challenge or just for his attention. Cas would wake the monster in Dean’s belly, the one that roils with fear when Cas comes too close, when Cas drives his baby, when Cas puts his fingers on Dean’s forehead to heal him.

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” Cas says. Dean doesn’t say, _don’t go_. There’s nothing to do in here but shoot things, and Dean just told him he couldn’t do that, and couldn’t even muster up a decent explanation as to why. So Dean puts his earmuffs back on and his bullet blows a hole through the center of his target.

It doesn’t occur to him that he could just follow Cas out.

* * *

Sam does it to rile him up, Dean knows, but it still— it works. Sam says, “Hey, been a while since you’ve been on a date, huh.”

Dean chokes on his beer. Cas is _right_ there, he thinks, and then he thinks— why the hell does that matter? He says, “I— that’s none of your goddamn business.”

Sam shrugs. “I dunno, man, I just figure— just seems outta character, is all.”

“I already got what I need here,” Dean says quietly, ashamedly, and finishes his beer in one long gulp. He pops the top off another one, his fifth of the night, and says, louder, “I ain’t cleaning up.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Sam starts stacking plates, and stops when he gets to Cas’s half-eaten shepherd’s pie. “You finished with that?”

“This? Oh—” and Cas nods. “Yes, I’m still— still learning how to work up an appetite, I suppose.”

“No worries.” Sam balances the plates on his freakishly huge hands, says, “I’ll save yours, ‘case you want some later, man.” And Sam throws a— a _knowing look_ at Dean, Christ alive, and gets over to the kitchen.

After a pause, Cas asks, “Have you been looking for dates, Dean?”

“What?” Dean snorts. “Hell no. And anyway, who the hell would wanna date _me_. Forty year old basket case.” He flexes his hand, and suddenly he’s— he’s in Lisa’s house, pushing her against the wall, nothing but violence in him, the vampire-bloodlust some crazy unknowable mix of desire and disgust. What he did to her was a goddamn atrocity. And Sam thinks he should— what, find another civilian to get killed? Jesus Christ.

Cas says, “I think you’d be a… ‘catch,’” air quotes and everything, and Dean laughs. Cas frowns, though. “I mean it, Dean. You’re— you’re very kind, and loving, and of course you’re very handsome. And I’m given to understand that cooking ability is extremely desirable in the dating scene.”

 _And of course you’re very handsome_. Dean’s not touching the rest of it with a ten foot pole, but that— handsome, Cas thinks he’s, or maybe it’s— Cas is just being nice. Dean thinks he probably looks disgusting, slumped over in his chair with a beer gut growing by the millisecond.

“Nice of you to say, Cas,” Dean settles on eventually. He swallows more of his beer. Sam shouldn’t have said a damn word. Oh, yeah, Dean knows all about it. He remembers Sam wondering aloud whether Dean might _find someone in the life_ , that one time after Dodge City when Sam had said, _hey, looks like someone’s in a good mood_ , Sam hinting that _maybe there’s someone in your life already_. The thing is just. Well. Dean doesn’t go there.

He raps his knuckles on the table and mumbles out a, “Good night, Cas,” and doesn’t let Cas follow him out.

* * *

When Dean is twenty, Sam’s sixteen and antsy, itching to get out, but Dean just surveils him even harder. Flagstaff is only two years in the rearview mirror. Dean knows what his priorities are.

He makes sure Sam runs his drills, can take Dad’s M15 apart and put it back together in under two minutes, knows not to carry the Jennings around when it’s loaded. He sets up empty beer cans in overgrown industrial fields four miles from the highway and watches Sam shoot them down. He tells Sam half-made up rumors about other hunter’s kids who died ‘cause they couldn’t reload fast enough, tells Sam about how Dad might let them stay in one place for longer if he thinks they’re safe, tells Sam he can earn stability if he just holds his pistol right.

When Dean is twenty, Dad catches him with a guy just outside their motel. No funny business or anything — just Dean and Brian, who Dean hustled out of two hundred bucks in a pool game two hours earlier, smoking in the parking lot while Sam sleeps inside. They’re sharing a fifth of whiskey, and Dean makes a show of licking the rim when he’s done with his taste, and then there’s the sound of the safety clicking off and Dad’s there, cocking his gun at Brian.

“Not sure who the hell you are,” Dad says, with his goddamn 5906 in Brian’s face, and Dean screws the cap back onto his whiskey. “But far as I’m aware, my son’s supposed to be watching out for his little brother inside that motel room, so either you’ve got some kinda spell on him or he’s just forgotten what the hell the word _safety_ means. One way or another, you better leave before I have to drag you out of this parking lot.”

“Jesus, Dad—”

“A spell, huh?” Oh Christ. Dean tries to get Brian to back off, but no, the guy’s got— Dean knew he had a fire in him and he respects it, sure, that’s why the hell he brought him back in the first place, but there’s fire and then there’s suicide and when a man’s pointing a gun in your face— “I’m flattered you think I’m that pretty, but older guys aren’t really my type—”

“Brian,” Dean hisses, because he— Dean knows better than to say shit like that, and—

Dad raises an eyebrow. “This the kinda guy you let within twenty feet of your brother?”

“Get outta here, Brian,” Dean mutters, and thank Christ, he does it. Brian holds a hand out for the whiskey, and he strokes his fingers against Dean’s when he takes the bottle, and Dean— Dean flushes, red and bright and obvious under the parking lot fluorescents, and Brian pushes past John Winchester looking like he doesn’t have a care in the goddamn world.

Dad finally puts the gun down, tucks it back into his waistband, and Dean exhales. “Your friend’s gonna get himself killed one day,” he says, walking into the motel room, and Dean tries not to hear a threat in it. It’s a statement of fact, is all. Brian — the way he is, the things he said — sad as it is, Dean wouldn’t be surprised if he ended up in the crime section of this nowhere-town’s paper three months from now. Dad’s just pointing it out. Dad’s just saying, if you don’t get it together, you’re gonna leave Sam behind in just the same way.

Dean watches Dad put the gun on the side table before opening Sam’s bedroom door to look at him. Sam sleeps hunched into himself these days, curled up tight even though he’s growing faster than a weed, eating his way through Dean’s pool money faster than Dean can win it back. Dean doesn’t want to face it, but there’s something in that kid that’s made for bigger things than this, something that chafes at the motel kitchen mac and cheese and the floss stitches in moldy bathrooms, and that something will get out sooner or later. One day Sam won’t need to lock and load Dad’s Jennings in two seconds flat.

When that happens — when Sam’s gone and Dad’s Smith & Wesson 5906 is in Dean’s waistband — then Dean will go out to a bar. Dean will make a show of licking the rim of his fifth of whiskey. He’ll be allowed to end up in the crime section of a nowhere-town’s paper three months later, because what came before it was worth the risk, and because nobody will be left to need him.

Until then, though, Dean won’t go there.

* * *

Dean is manning the bar while Donnie is out back getting ice from the ice machine next to the corner that’s perfect for a smoke, and some asshole with a business bro haircut and a suit that’s too expensive for Donnie’s tries to hassle Lindsay. “C’mere,” the guy’s saying, drunk, and Lindsay walks over to within two feet of him and he starts getting grabby. “Hey. You’re pretty.”

“You’re not my type,” Lindsay says, nicely enough, and walks behind the bar. Dean likes Lindsay. She’s a no-nonsense kinda kid, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, saving up to go to Kansas State and get a degree in architecture. She sketches buildings on bar napkins that Dean wants to live in, and buildings that make Dean think of angels, that make Dean think of the terror in his gut when he first laid eyes on Cas, buildings that Dean would pray to.

The asshole slumps over the bar, leering in her direction, and Dean makes his way towards them. Asshole says, “What, you don’t want me?” and Lindsay says, “Even if I was into men I wouldn’t be into you,” and Asshole says, “You a fuckin’ dyke—” and Dean slams his head into the countertop.

“Woah,” Lindsay says, as his head rolls to the side. She puts her fingers on his pulse point and says, “Least he’s still breathing.”

“Not much of a loss if he wasn’t,” Dean spits, and then sighs. “Fuck. I gotta call him a cab or somethin’, huh.”

“Let’s see if he has any ID, maybe someone to call,” Lindsay says, and walks back around to pull his wallet and his phone out of his pocket. No one in the bar seems to care that their substitute bartender just knocked a guy out, and none of them make any moves to order anything either, which Dean appreciates.

Dean puts Asshole’s thumb on his phone to unlock it. He scrolls through his recent texts, grimacing at the contents of the fraternity group chat. “I’ll call someone from his frat,” Dean says, waving Lindsay off when she tries to help.

The first two guys don’t pick up, and when Dean gets to the third, he hears a click behind him. “That was assault, y’know,” Asshole says. Dean turns around. Asshole has a fucking Glock. “This would be self-defence.”

The bar is still and silent. Lindsay puts a glass down, slowly, at the other end of the bar. “You wanna head out, be my guest,” Dean says, reaching for his own gun as subtly as he can. “I ain’t keeping you here.”

“You think I’m just gonna let this slide?” The guy’s holding his gun with two hands. His arms are shaking. “You can’t just— I should call the fucking cops.”

“Call the cops on the guy you’re threatening with a gun, real smart,” Dean says. And then, before Dean has to talk his way out of a fucking hostage situation, the door to that back alley opens. Asshole’s head jerks to look at Donnie coming in and Dean takes the chance, jumps over the bar to smash his nose in and disarm him in one go.

“Trouble?” Donnie asks, handing Lindsay the ice bag and making sure she’s all right and then following Dean as he drags the unconscious asshole outside, out back near the dumpster and the ice machine. “That was impressive. Very heroic.”

Impressive. The word tastes foul. Dean thinks — he thinks, this is a nowhere-town, and its newspaper has a crime section. Dad’s 5906 is cold against the small of his back. “I better call this guy’s friends,” he says, and the third fraternity brother picks up. He gives him the bar’s address and then hangs up.

“Makes me so— so goddamn mad,” Dean grits out, and it’s only after he says it that he feels it rushing in him, the anger. John Winchester put a gun in Brian’s face twenty years ago. Why did he do that? What— what instinct in him made it— and twenty years later, the same thing. The same goddamn thing. What could be worth it, what could be worth shooting a civilian in a bar, over what— a rejection? The fact that she was a lesbian? Dean’s hands are shaking and he drops Asshole’s phone.

Donnie makes a little _mm hmm_ sound, subvocal, and Dean squats down to pick up the phone and just stays there, resting on his heels next to an unconscious body ten feet away from that corner between the ice machine and the dumpster. “I don’t wanna die anymore,” Dean whispers, out into the world like he’s just asking for someone to prove him wrong, and then he bows his head and he’s— his breath hitches like he’s crying, only he isn’t, there’s nothing left in him but air.

He croaks out, hiccuping, thinking of that Glock pointed at him and the fact that Dad’s Smith & Wesson 5906 is in Dean’s waistband and thinking of Brian’s slow and steady blink in the face of it all those years ago, “I don’t wanna die like this. I don’t wanna die with a bullet in my head.”

Donnie crouches down next to him, hand on Dean’s back, as warm as Dad’s gun is cold. “Jesus Christ, Dean, yeah, I don’t want you to die either. You don’t deserve that.”

“Thought that was the option,” Dean says, the whole sorry feeling spilling out of him two decades too late, “as if getting what you want is always— always has a price— I don’t know, I don’t know, like a gun is all I got waiting for me at the end of the line. But shit, Donnie.” He looks up at him. Donnie reminds him of Brian, in a way, that ease in his skin that only comes from knowing who you are and the bite that comes from standing upright in the world’s wind. In another life, he’d want him so bad. “Shit,” he whispers, realizing it all at once. “I don’t wanna go out like this.”

“You won’t.” Donnie shakes his head. “God damn, Dean, I’m— I don’t know, hell, I’m sorry you had to deal with this while I was out getting— goddamn ice.”

“No, hey, it ain’t your fault—”

“And it isn’t yours either.” Donnie fixes him with a stare. “Seriously. I get it, this is— it’s scary, you’re allowed to be scared, man. But you didn’t die tonight.” He cracks a grin. “You’re not dying in my bar if I have any say over it.”

“Thanks,” Dean croaks out, and then he drops his head, winded. Donnie rubs a slow circle in the center of Dean’s upper back, and Dean shakes. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Thanks, man.”

“Yeah. Anytime.”

They stay there, crouched on the ground next to the passed out asshole, until his buddy walks out of the back door. Clearly he came through the bar, which— God, if Dean left Lindsay alone to deal with him— Dean stands up and starts, “You say anything to Lindsay—”

“What?” At least the guy looks shamefaced about the whole situation. “Jesus, no, I’m not— what the hell did Chris do, anyway?”

Dean blows out a breath. “Your buddy here pointed a gun in my face, that’s what. I suggest you stop letting him out of the house with arms.”

“Holy shit.” Frat Bro #3 runs a hand through his hair. “I mean— shit, I’m glad nobody got hurt.” He whips his head up. “No one got hurt, right?”

Donnie shakes his head.

“Okay. Okay, wow.” Frat Bro #3 walks around to Chris’s feet, and looks down at him. “Uh, do you… want to press charges?”

Donnie looks over at Dean. Dean snorts. “What? Like hell I’m calling the cops. Just keep your boy in line, man.”

Frat Bro scratches the back of his head. “Okay, uh. Can you keep his gun? I don’t really feel comfortable handling it, I didn’t even know he had one—”

“Yeah, sure.” Dean figures it’ll make a good addition to Donnie’s behind-the-bar security detail. “Hey. Watch yourselves, all right? The whole reason he got in this was ‘cause he was hassling one of Donnie’s waitresses.”

Frat Bro blinks. “Uh.”

“You know how I knew to call you? I read your group chat.” Dean watches Frat Bro pale. Dean looks down, and reads out, “ _Bro odds she lets you do anal_. _Lol I bet I could do it without her stopping me. Damn dude thats brutal, respect though. B-T-W no one ask Emily out she’s mine_.” His lip curls. “This is filth. This is the shit that makes your buddy whip out a gun when a girl rejects him.”

“I— look, it doesn’t mean anything—”

“It means something when I have a twenty-two year old feeling unsafe at her workplace because a customer doesn’t know the difference between yes and no,” Donnie chimes in, and takes the phone out of Dean’s hand. “I’m gonna break this, because it disgusts me. I suggest you figure it out.”

Frat Bro must see something in the two of them, and says, “Fuck, okay, yeah, sure,” nodding like a bobblehead the whole while. He hefts his friend up into the backseat of his car, and Dean and Donnie don’t lift a finger to help.

Donnie tosses the phone onto the ground, about four feet away. He says, “I know you have a gun. Go nuts, if you want.”

Dean’s mouth twitches. He should give it to Charlie to wipe. He should donate it to one of those places that recycles electronics or whatever the fuck.

But Donnie looks at him. Dean pulls out his gun, and blows a hole through the center of the phone. Then he drives home, and cleans his gun, and loads it, and clicks the safety on, and puts it under his pillow the way he does every single night, because he sleeps alone.

* * *

Cas is reading when Dean knocks on his doorframe. “You wanna come with me to Smith Center? Get some groceries.”

Cas asks, “Can I finish this page?”

“Yeah, ‘course, man.” Dean hovers awkwardly in the doorway until Cas nods at the bed, and Dean perches on the end, a foot away from Cas’s bare feet poking out from the ends of his sweatpants.

His chest aches, looking at him. Cas looks so at home. Dean did that to him. Pulled him down out of heaven, and some days he hates himself for it and other days he thinks, this is the only thing I’ve ever done worth a damn.

Of course, neither is true. It was Cas’s choice to live in the bunker. And Dean has done better things. Dean raised Sam, after all, and Sam is a better man than either Dean or Cas will be.

Cas asks, “Do you want me to read to you?” and Dean says, _sure_ , and flops back to listen.

It starts strange, a bullet held in place with a leash like a dog. “My brothers kiss their bullet in a dark cul-de-sac,” Cas recites, his voice low and grainy and mountainous in Dean’s flatland home, “in front of the corner-store ice machine, in the passenger seat of their car, on a strobe-lighted dance floor. My brothers’ bullet kisses them back.”

The poem — because that’s what it is, that’s what Cas is reading, Dean catches a glimpse of the cover that reads POSTCOLONIAL LOVE POEM from where he’s lying — moves on, outward, and Dean’s throat bobs as his eardrum vibrates with the echo of Cas reading _Eventually, my brothers call out Here, bullet, here— their bullet always comes running, buzzing._

Cas’s lamp buzzes softly with light that’s warmer than the bunker’s overheads. Cas says, “We wouldn’t go so far as to call our bullet a prophet, my brothers say,” and Dean blinks, eyes suddenly, inexplicably wet. “But my brothers’ bullet is always lit like a night-church. It makes my brothers holy.”

In the space of a breath, Dean inhales shakily, and then Cas cuts him in half with Natalie Diaz’s finale: “You could say my brothers’ bullet cleans them—the way red ants wash the empty white bowl of a dead coyote’s eye socket. Yes, my brother’s bullet cleans them, makes them ready for God.”

His voice trembles in the air for one soft and violent moment. Dean breathes out, “Fuck, Cas,” and Cas closes the book. There are tears on his face. Dean says to the ceiling, “Oh God,” and chokes as he scrubs his face. Stupid. Stupid.

Cas says, quietly, “Are you all right, Dean?”

“I don’t want a bullet,” Dean whispers, and sits up in a sudden and desperate rush to take the gun out of his boot, stands up to put it in Cas’s drawer and he closes the drawer on it, stands there with his hand on the drawer handle, half a foot from Cas’s body. He turns to look down at Cas, his head tilted downward like Christ and Cas looking up at him like Mary Magdalene, and Dean thinks _thank God for that bullet_ and Dean says, “I don’t want a bullet.”

“Dean—”

“I didn’t want you shooting in that firing range because I didn’t wanna love you there,” Dean croaks out, his face hot. It’s the truth of it, though. “I didn’t wanna look at you— I didn’t wanna look at you and think, he’s beautiful. Not there. Not surrounded by guns, not firing a hole in a piece of paper made to look like a person, not—” Cas’s hand comes up to grip his and Dean shakes. “Cas, I didn’t want—”

Cas pulls him down and Dean settles in his lap, knees on either side of Cas’s thighs, forehead against his. “Yes,” Cas murmurs, hand coming up to stroke through Dean’s hair. “What you deserve is more gentle than that. You deserve the softest love in the world.”

“I want it,” Dean admits, feeling curled inside out and rotten and scraped clean all at the same time. He’s never wanted anything like this before in his life. He’s terrified. He looks at Cas, and Cas looks at him, and Dean leans in, and Cas—

Cas kisses him, and his hands are soft on Dean’s skin, and his sweater is soft under Dean’s palms, and his mouth is soft against Dean’s, and the noises he makes are soft, soft, soft. “I love you,” Cas says quietly, as if it’s the easiest thing in the world to say, and Dean huffs out a laugh.

“Yeah, shit, buddy,” he breathes recklessly, disbelievingly into Cas’s mouth, feeling the tips of his ears prickle with his blush as Cas circles the pad of his thumb around the pinna. It’s impossible. And yet, here it is: Dad’s gun out of sight, and Sam somewhere Dean can follow, and the crime section of their nowhere-town’s paper full of nothing but petty theft and vandalism. And Dean, saying: “I love you, too.”


End file.
